Dominic Welsh awarded an honorary DMath Degree and addressed convocation
Friday, June 16, 2006
Dominic
Welsh
is
a
leading
contributor
to
combinatorial
mathematics
in
several
ways.
In
research,
his
significant
contributions
began
with
his
doctoral
thesis,
"On
stochastic
processes,
with
special
reference
to
percolation
theory".
This
was
a
basis
for
much
further
work,
including
the
Russo-Seymour-Welsh
theorem.
He
has
made
significant
contributions
to
matroid
theory,
including
a
text
with
that
title,
which
held
centre
stage
in
that
discipline
for
fifteen
years,
until
the
spotlight
shifted
to
a
text
by
one
of
his
former
research
students
-
James
Oxley.
Another
significant
paper
describes
how
unavoidably
complex
it
is
to
calculate
Tutte
polynomials
for
graphs,
and
Jones
polynomials
for
knots.
These
are
samples:
in
all,
there
are
over
eighty
research
articles,
seven
textbooks,
thirty
research
students.